Christmas morning craziness is over but it’s still
Christmastide, the twelve days of Christmas that stretch from the midnight
announcement of Christmas day to the Epiphany arrival of the three Magi. The Christmas company has departed. Alone at last, Mary watches over her
baby. This is a part of Christmas, too.

I’m too introverted to be comfortable with the classic Nativity
scenes. They’re typically crowded with
kings and their retinues, shepherds flocking down from the hills, angels on
rooftops and dancing with the stars, and a stable-full of oxen and asses. To find Mary and the baby, you have to search through all the turmoil.

Painting in Florence and Rome in the late 15th century, Sandro Botticelli had a knack for crowded Nativity scenes. In this early Botticelli Adoration of the Kings, I count more than 50 onlookers, a half-dozen
horses, and a peacock (it’s on the wall on the right). If it looks like a parade, that’s because
Botticelli was almost certainly working from impressions of his hometown’s famous
Brotherhood of the Magi pageants, known for their opulence. A sense of wealth overwhelms the humbleness
of the manger setting.

Technically, Botticelli’s early crowd scene is impressive,
with its high-Renaissance mastery of architectural perspective and its varied
portrait gallery. Botticelli skillfully
utilizes the tondo (round) format that was becoming popular at the time for
paintings designed for private devotions.
But this crowded house isn’t what I crave from a Nativity scene. For my private Nativity devotion, I prefer quiet, mystery, and a dash of expectant hope (the same elements I always hope
for in a Christmas Eve service).

Botticelli’s Adoration
of the Kings tondo came early in his career, perhaps one of his first works
after finishing an apprenticeship with Fra Filippo Lippi in his early
twenties. As Botticelli matured—and his
artistry became even more assured—he continued to paint Nativities, Magi
scenes, and virgin-and-child images. With
some of his paintings, he started to pare the crowds back, placing more
emphasis upon Mary and the baby.

In The Virgin Adoring
the Child at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC,
painted circa 1490 when Botticelli was around 45 years old, the Nativity is reduced to
its barest essentials: Mary and child. Even Joseph is absent. The only intruders into this pastoral scene
are a discreet ox and donkey, content to keep to the shadows.

Mary crosses her hands in a traditional sign of resignation
to the will of God. As in all of
Botticelli’s mature works, Mary expresses a sadness that acknowledges an
awareness of her son’s destiny. Jesus’
sacrifice is hers as well. Her sorrow will
continue unabated through the lamentation and Pieta depictions of Mary cradling
the body of the crucified Jesus. In
birth and in death, the figure of Mary calls us to contemplation of the
fragility of humanity.

Exquisitely framed by a ruined stable wall, this Botticelli tondo is a triumph of personal devotion imagery. We are asked to enter into the spirit of Mary. The world is quiet, the child calls to us, and we respond with grace. Above, revealed in a corner of sky, the Star of Bethlehem still shines, trailing glory.

In Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting The Annunciation, Mary’s toes peek out from under her robe.
She’s a teenage girl getting ready for bed—not beautiful perhaps, but when the
light shines on her she’s radiant. She’s a girl who has no idea how
pretty she is.

Most representations of Mary in art depict her as older and
classically beautiful. She usually appears gentle, obedient, patient, and
humble. Maybe a little dull, too. She rarely looks like the teenage
girls I’ve met.

But, in all fairness, the classical representation of Mary
is perfectly in line with the information that the evangelist Luke supplies in
his gospel telling of the Annunciation. When sending the angel Gabriel to
her doorstep, God implies that Mary is just about perfection on earth.
This is the porcelain Mary of the Old Masters.

Painting in 1898, working from the same text as the religious
artists who preceded him, Henry Ossawa Tanner teased out an endlessly
interesting Mary who succeeds in being a teenage girl while also suggesting why
God might look on her with approval. It’s a difficult balance,
miraculously achieved by Tanner. I like to think he was working from that
little section in the middle of the scene where Mary talks back to
Gabriel. “How shall this be,” she asks the angel, “since I have no
husband?” A good actress could say that line many ways. It could be
said with harsh disbelief (“Get real, angel…”), or deep sarcasm (“yeah,
right…”), or confusion (“I think you may have the wrong Mary…”), or concern
(“do you know something I don’t know”), or curiosity (“tell me more…”).

Tanner’s Mary is a charmer. Overcoming any initial fear,
she leans forward toward the angel. She gives a little half-smile, as if
coaxing Gabriel to tell more. “I’m listening,” she seems to say.
“You have my attention. Now convince me.”

She looks smart. And she looks like she could be
wickedly funny. There’s a wit to the way she cocks her head, waiting for
a response. “How shall this be since I have no husband?” She’s
sharp enough to say it with quiet irony. Then she patiently waits for the
reply. She’s a listener.

Her hands are clasped, perhaps implying that the angel has
interrupted her mid-prayer. But now the prayer is forgotten as Gabriel
fully commands her attention and interest. She is mulling the words of
the angel, his prophetic announcement that she will be the mother of one who
will “reign over the house of Jacob forever.” That’s a big—and potentially
awkward—claim for an unwed teenage girl from a small village like Nazareth.

But the light that fills the room is real. Her
inclination is to accept the miraculous. And so she asks the question,
“How shall this be…” already inwardly knowing that she is strong enough and brave
enough to face this future.

That’s just my interpretation. The son of an African
Methodist Episcopal bishop, Henry Ossawa Tanner was doubtless better schooled in the Bible
than me. He taught Sunday School in his young adult years, regularly
attended church throughout his life, and painted Biblical scenes with commitment and enthusiasm for more than three decades. A couple of years ago, I attended
the Henry Ossawa Tanner special exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the
Fine Arts where you could view the range of his religious painting. A
gentle spirituality permeated the show, with The Annunciation setting the tone.

You’d think the innovative use of blinding light to
represent the angel Gabriel would dominate the picture. But Mary more than holds her own. I keep coming back to Tanner’s representation
of Mary because it’s her humanity that ultimately makes the painting so
captivating. It’s a humanity that is at the core of the Annunciation
story and is so often missed.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Fade in. An angel appears before
Mary. The angel makes a surprising proposal, Mary responds with a
question, the angel reassures her, and she graciously agrees to the plan.
The vignette has a beginning, middle, and end. Classically constructed,
the scene begins with the angel announcing, “Hail, O favored one, the Lord is
with You!” and ends with Mary entering into an agreement, “(L)et it be to me
according to your word.” Fade out.

As told by the evangelist Luke in his gospel, the
Annunciation has the shape of a conventional narrative. It unfolds like a
well-constructed movie scene.

Most art of the Annunciation—both literary and visual—treats
the scene as conventional narrative, in the manner of Luke. The artist
thoughtfully selects a moment in the story that captures what they want to
express about the text. It could be the second when the angel enters, or
the angel greeting Mary, or Mary’s asking “How shall this be?” or Mary’s final
note of gracious acceptance. That’s the normal way of doing things.

Jan van Eyck’s masterpiece The Annunciation employs a very different strategy, sometimes used by the Old Masters but rarely to this extent. The whole story flashes before us at a stroke, with van Eyck treating time with the creativity that Cezanne would later
bring to the treatment of space. In van Eyck’s The Annunciation, there is no natural beginning
or end, no unfolding of narrative, no reading from left to right. The
story is shaped into an image that instantaneously contains the whole.

Within a single frame, the angel enters, the angel speaks,
Mary responds with a dramatic gesture symbolizing alarm, the angel reassures,
and Mary speaks the final words. It’s all there.

But this brief Annunciation story is wrapped within a much larger story. Biblical history, prophecy, and theology surround the main characters through the illustrations on the tiled floor and the paintings and stained glass that decorate the walls. The remarkable details on the two most prominent tile scenes depict David slaying Goliath and Samson pulling down the temple, events that were believed to prefigure the works of Jesus. This mighty encompassing framework is an important part of van Eyck’s vision.
Vast history is telescoped into a narrow scene with the Annunciation
particulars in the foreground and the Biblical backstory lining the background.

Van Eyck’s grand painting is awash in symbolism, with the
drama enacted in a sacred space—the church interior. The
angel utters the visible words “Ave gratia plena” (translation: “Hail, full of
Grace…”) and the words of Mary’s response, “ecce ancilla domini” (translation:
“Behold, the handmaiden of the Lord…”) appear upside down. They have been
flipped because they are addressed to neither Gabriel nor the viewer but rather
upward to God, whose Holy Spirit is descending as a dove on streaming rays of
gold leaf.

The apostle Paul famously said in his first letter to the
Corinthians that we see through a glass, darkly. Rooted in secular time
and space, most of the world’s artwork explores the limited viewpoint which is
part of the human condition. But in this one painting, van Eyck ventures
to depict a world stripped of its mundane and profane elements, where every
detail resonates with the sacred.

One day, God sent an angel to carry a message to a young woman in Nazareth. In the painting above, we see a depiction of the scene. The artists offer a 15th century Netherlandish interpretation of the story of the Annunciation as related by the evangelist Luke in the first chapter of his gospel. For us today, as well as for people who lived in the Netherlands nearly 600 years ago, the Biblical story is far removed from present experience. To enter the scene requires an act of sympathetic imagination.

The early Netherlandish artists were poets of the
imagination. In their extraordinarily beautiful works, time
and space are collapsed. Past, present, and future merge together into
one; a house in Nazareth becomes a house in Belgium which
stands for a house anywhere… everywhere. Through contemplation of their
paintings, viewers are invited to enter into the scenes as part of the work of
devout meditation.

Standing prayerfully before the Mérode
Altarpiece, a masterpiece of early Netherlandish art by Robert Campin and
his workshop, you might consider the perspective of the donors on the left,
Joseph on the right, or Mary front and center. Each perspective would
offer different avenues for exploration of the painting and its themes.
In the left panel, the contemporary donors approach the story reverently but
are forever kept at a distance—they are outsiders gifted with a view of the miraculous,
once removed. In the right panel, Joseph models a conscientious,
methodical approach to the task at hand (the task being the work of salvation).
These characters are models meant to encourage us. It is good to be like
a reverent, wealthy donor. It is good to be a diligent worker like
Joseph.

But on a much grander scale, Campin calls for everyone,
regardless of gender, to identify with Mary in the
magnificent center panel of the triptych. Her unexpected meeting with the
angel Gabriel has cosmic implications; everything on earth and in heaven will
hinge on her response. She has the freedom to say, “I am the handmaid of
the Lord” or, conversely, she has the freedom to say, “remove this cup from
me,” as Jesus would later consider requesting in the Garden of Gethsemane.
Perhaps she even has freedom to decline to acknowledge the presence of the angel in the
room—to continue reading her book, her eyes fixed on the expected rather than
the unexpected.

When Campin and his workshop artists painted this triptych
in the early 15th century, there was a religious movement in the land
called Devotio Moderna, a turn
toward a set of monastic-based practices of humility, obedience, and
simplicity. It was a pre-Protestant critique of the wealth and empire of
the dominant Catholic culture, offering a deep spirituality accessible to the
growing middle class. As part of the rather mystic approach of Devotio Moderna, Christians were called
to meditate on Biblical scenes as if they were inside them—to imaginatively
converse and interact with the characters within the scenes.

Some art historians believe that the early Netherlandish
artists like Robert Campin intentionally created some of their artworks to serve as
instruments for meditation in the new Devotio
Moderna style. Deep in reverent prayer, you enter the
scene. The time that separates you by 2,000 years from an ancient—and
seemingly irrecoverable—reality becomes meaningless. The deep past is no
further away than the second that just passed. Similarly, the vast distance that
separates you from Nazareth
becomes meaningless. It is all holy space.

The moment is now, in Nazareth twenty centuries ago.
The moment is now, a cloudy day in Belgium six centuries ago. The moment is now,
experiencing the painting in The Cloisters in WashingtonHeights, New York City.
The moment is now, wherever you are.

There’s an angel in the room.

Campin, assisted by his workshop of talented artists,
invites the viewer to look up and greet the miraculous. And he implicitly
challenges the viewer to respond as Mary would:

Monday, December 8, 2014

The world’s oldest animated dinosaur, Gertie, turned 100
this year. Gertie made her world debut
in February 1914, with the animated dinosaur appearing to interact with her
live creator, the brilliant artist Winsor McCay (1869-1934), on a vaudeville
stage in Chicago. Last month, I celebrated this important early
cinema anniversary at a Museum
of Modern Art film event
hosted by John Canemaker (who led the audience in a “Happy Birthday” sing-along!)
but I didn’t celebrate here on my blog, where I had really hoped to find the
time to compose a multi-part blog series.

Someday I may still get to it, but in the meantime, here are
my notes on subjects and questions that might reward future development:

—Pay tribute to a hundred years’ worth of changes to the exterior of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History (contrast
today’s museum with a screen capture from 1914?).

—Illuminate those dark interiors of the AmericanMuseum of Natural History to better
expose the museum! (Poor McCay was
hampered by a refusal from the museum staff to allow appropriate film
lighting.)

—Compare/contrast: From McCay’s personality animation of a
mosquito in How a Mosquito Operates (1912)
to the full-blown personality animation of Gertie.

On command, Gertie lifts her foot,
complete with animated shadow.

—What it would have been like to first-hand witness
McCay’s vaudeville act with its lightning sketches? And what would it have been like to have been
in one of the first audiences for Gertie
the Dinosaur, with McCay snapping his whip???

—Speculate on the vaudeville musical
accompaniment that would have added a third component to the multimedia
production (film, live performance, and live music).

—Explore Gertie’s
use of the screen as an extension of the vaudeville stage, with great depth of
field (a lake extending into the distance).

—What kind of a dinosaur is Gertie? This question
would naturally lead to an exploration of turn-of-the-century dinosaur
representation.

—What kind of a sea serpent is in the water? This
question would naturally lead to an exploration of turn-of-the-century sea
serpent representation.

—Gertie as a toddler. Gertie with a diagnosis of ADHD.

—Gertie as a puppy.

—Gertie’s size, and the question of whether
Gertie is treated to a pumpkin or an apple.

Thursday, October 30, 2014

Five years ago, Kevin B. Lee invited Christianne Benedict
and me to talk about Horror of Dracula
(1958) for a podcast on his now-dormant blog Shooting Down Pictures.

Man, it’s fun to talk about Dracula!

During our 25-minute horror geek-out, Christianne and I
ranged freely across the broad vampiric landscape, with fun tangents on the
Hammer Dracula’s similarity to James Bond, low-cut inspirations for
Victoria’s Secret, the professionalization of the vampire stalking business, the threat from
the east, and Bram Stoker’s ever-lurking anti-Semitism and misogyny.

Going into this podcast, I was more than a little
intimidated by the prospect of playing Siskel/Roeper to Christianne
Benedict. She is my favorite living film
critic. When I watch a movie and then want to sample
an intelligent critical response, I take a beeline to her blog first. At Krell Labs, I can always depend on being
challenged and delighted by unexpected insights backed by solid film
scholarship.

This remains my one-and-only podcast, which
probably says much about my performance. I drawl, stutter, repeat
myself, and say ummmm way too much. But
the content’s pretty good, rendering the total podcast respectable enough to
deserve a chance to rise from the grave again this Halloween season.

Christianne, Kevin Lee, and I bonded years ago on the
IMDb (International Movie Database) Classic Film Board. These days,
Christianne and I primarily express our love for movies through our blogs. Meanwhile, Kevin is a rising star. After completing the Shooting Down Pictures project (where he blogged himself through
the 1,000 greatest films of all time as compiled by the website They Shoot Pictures Don’t They?), Kevin became
a filmmaker himself—swiftly gaining a reputation as an innovative master of the emerging video essay format.

This week, it would be worth a trip to Austria to
catch Kevin’s remarkable short documentary Transformers: The Premake at the prestigious Viennale (Vienna International Film
Festival) 2014. This 25-minute film is an
intoxicating joyride that wickedly dissects film production, promotion, and
fandom. And if you can’t make it to Vienna, enjoy a viewing below in its most natural setting: YouTube.

So gorge yourself on the podcast and video treats... and whether you go trick-or-treating this year as the Prince of
Darkness or as a shape-shifting robot monster, Happy Halloween to all!

Monday, October 6, 2014

Seventy-five years ago,Jean Renoir filmedThe Rules of the Game (1939) ...

Jean Renoir as a bear, with Nora Gregor andMarcel Dalio to his right in folk costume.

In the spirit of the season, I offer some Halloween costume ideas inspired by Jean Renoir’s classic film The Rules of the Game (1939): bear costumes, Austrian folk clothes, traditionally-sheeted ghosts, and a classic skeletal Death.

In The Rules of the
Game, a masquerade is announced at the country estate of La Colinière—a
time for the elite to play dress-up, Halloween-style. Jean Renoir, genius
director and pratfalling actor, dresses as his alter ego, a bear. The
party’s hosts are in the colorful Tyrolean getups.

Then, as things really start getting wild and weird,
Death takes the stage.

The Master of Ceremonies arrives.

Screams followed by laughter.

Like guests touring a modern-day haunted house attraction, the high society
regulars at La Colinière enjoy the domesticated thrill of an encounter with the
inexplicable. The ghosts that dance with Death leave the stage and
playfully terrorize the appreciative audience. We all love to be
frightened, provided it’s a predictable scare at a designated hour in a safe
place.

Of course, this being a film masterpiece, the scene functions on
several levels, simultaneously launching farce while foreshadowing
tragedy. The gliding camera picks up on numerous subplots, deepening and
commenting upon them.

For Death’s set piece, a player piano slips into Camille
Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre.
Backstage, four men don their costumes—three as ghosts and the fourth as Death.
The curtain drops and the cavorting ghosts are revealed against a black background, each dancing with an umbrella frame like a prescient undead version of Singin’ in the Rain.

Leaping and prancing, Death leads the ghosts in the dance. When the ghosts descend into the audience,
Death appears to be looking for something in particular. He spots the two playful lovers whose actions
will trigger the climactic tragedy.

Death spies the lovers, played by Julien Carette and Paulette Dubost.

The Rules of the
Game offers the classic Halloween ghost
costume: white sheets with cutout eyes. Under the sheets, they wear
black clothes (as well as black gloves and shoes) so as to blend in with the
background behind them. The umbrella frames, stripped of their fabric,
are an inspired touch.

And The Rules of the
Games offers a classic Death: a black leotard with an artistically
painted skeleton. The skull is a pull-over mask. The crisp white of the
bones makes them seem to glow in the dark.

It’s a charming Halloween ensemble, best played against a black stage and a soundtrack of Saint-Saëns.

Death dresses while the ghosts perform.

Here are some other classic film ideas for dressing up as ever-popular Death this Halloween season:

Tuesday, September 2, 2014

With the pounce of a bloody tomcat, violence is foreshadowed
in the first two paragraphs of Annie Dillard’s nonfiction narrative Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. It’s a classic horror novel opening. Then Dillard cleverly lulls the reader back
into complacency with a pastoral description of a morning stroll down the path to the creek. Janet Leigh’s heading toward the shower—what
could possibly go wrong?

Dillard sits by the flowing creek and in the last sentence
of the twelfth paragraph, she returns to Subject A:

“I’m drawn to this spot. I come to it as an oracle; I return to it as a man years later will seek
out the battlefield where he lost a leg or an arm.”

That’s the transition.
She’s about to unleash the horror.

Some critics compare Pilgrim
at Tinker Creek with Thoreau’s Walden,
but it reminds me more of Cormac McCarthy’s gore-splattered horror/western Blood Meridian. McCarthy works out his fixations on the macrocosm
of the parched deserts of the American west. Annie Dillard works with the same themes (a
quest for meaning against a backdrop of existential futility) by focusing on
the microcosm of life in her Virginia
backyard.

When Dillard spies a small frog, it’s like that moment in
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet where the
camera plunges below the manicured lawns.
The sense of order disintegrates. A seemingly alien world comes into view.

In paragraphs 13 through 17, Dillard observes—and then
broods upon—the annihilation of the frog.
Twenty years after reading these paragraphs for the first time, I’m
still mesmerized by the passage. To
proceed with this SPOILER, Dillard watches a frog being sucked dry by a giant
water bug:

“And just as I looked at him (the frog),
he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The
spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed.
His skin emptied and drooped; his
very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a
deflating football. I watched the taut,
glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked
balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water...”

For the rest of the book, Dillard struggles to comprehend a
theology capable of encompassing the annihilation of frogs. If she doesn’t entirely succeed in this quest,
her effort is as noble a failure as Herman Melville’s to fully understand the nature
of the white whale. At best, Job-like,
we glimpse God’s backside as he departs. In Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy never figures it out either. These are the themes that you wrestle with
till sunrise, leaving you broken and still unsatisfied.

But this is the world we live in, closely observed. If horror isn’t acknowledged as a neighbor of
theology, then the theology is cheap.
The creek is out back; death
waits there. The frog’s eyes are drained
of some undefinable spark, horrific as a transformation in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

“I never knew fear until I kissed
Becky.”

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

Like Melville, Dillard assumes the existence of God. And, like Melville, she is determined to
reconcile the Creator with the creation.
The notion of a fallen world does not enter into her equation. She accepts the world as is and holds God
responsible for its cruelties, pain, and death, rejecting any theology that
does not acknowledge giant water bugs.

Insects creep, crawl, and fly through the book. A mutilated Polyphemus moth creeps down a
driveway “on six furred feet,” a female praying mantis religiously observes her
cannibalistic sex rites, a starving clothes moth larva obsessively molts itself
into non-existence, a grasshopper exercises its 18 mouthparts, and there’s an
amazing description of a bee being eaten by a wasp being eaten by a
mantis. She teases, pokes, and prods at
the idea of insects in her search for profundity.

“I ought to keep a giant water bug in
an aquarium on my dresser, so I can think about it. We have brass candlesticks in our houses
now; we ought to display praying
mantises in our churches.”

Near the end of his life, Michelangelo painted a
self-portrait into his Last Judgment fresco, picturing himself as grotesque folds
of flayed skin, his countenance drooping like a kicked tent. I think the giant water bug caught him at
last. It’s a horrific way to look at
life. There’s no explaining it.

Monday, August 11, 2014

“It’s a regular
curio cabinet!” Juliette (Dita Parlo) exclaims in Jean Vigo’s masterpiece L’Atalante (1934) as she discovers the
strange and colorful items exhibited in the cabin of Père Jules (Michel Simon), the
barge’s first mate. Exotic objects hang
from the ceiling, are nailed to the walls, decorate the shelves, and rest on
the floor. It really does look like one
of those proto-museum displays that were known as “cabinets of curiosity” in
centuries past.

L’Atalante is an
examination of a young marriage, focusing upon Juliette and Jean, her barge
captain husband, as they journey along the Seine. While the details of the barge trip are often
realistic, the relationships on board the barge (the young couple, the first
mate, and a cabin boy) are conveyed more impressionistically. There are few characters on film quite as
charmingly strange as Père Jules, the gruff first mate who appears to have
lived a full and fascinating life. His
cabin is our window into his soul.

Père Jules allows Juliette to explore his cabin. She sees:

The aquatic collection.

Père Jules is a man of the water, with
a starfish and octopus nailed to his wall.
Juliette holds a shell to her ear.
And that’s a very impressive sawfish rostrum mounted on Père Jules’
bunk!

The toy collection.

Toys and miniatures are everywhere,
from a ceramic dog to a carved alligator.
A miniature skull resides next to a tiny guillotine. Juliette playfully cranks a music box while Père
Jules brings his prize puppet to life.
“I got him in Caracas,”
Jules says, “after the revolution in 1890.”

Juliette examines an anatomical specimen.

Juliette curiously picks up a tusk and
examines it. Père Jules identifies it as
“an anatomical specimen from a hunting trip.”

Screens, masks, and fans from abroad.

Père Jules has traveled the world. From Asia,
he boasts a large fan and a delicate painted screen. Masks hang on the walls. “Nothing but the finest things,” Jules
explains.

The art gallery.

Although he shows restraint with
Juliette, Père Jules is a carnal man.
His paintings and photographs depict women in various states of undress,
including nudes. The men in his
photographs are shirtless, too.

A mysterious jar.

The cabin may be a window into the soul
of Père Jules, but we see through the glass darkly. Mystery remains. Juliette stumbles upon a jar containing two
human hands. “That’s my friend who died
three years ago,” Jules says. “His
hands—all I have left of him.”

Historically, a cabinet of curiosities was intended to
showcase the interests of the owner.
These were the things that piqued the imagination of the proprietor. The links between the disparate objects provided
insight into the unique personality of the host.

All that's left of
Lee's Museum.

When I was a boy, I had a museum in my basement. Lee’s Museum had a chemistry table, a biology
section with specimens in formaldehyde, my pet iguana, shells, anatomy models, earth science displays, and lots of rocks and
fossils. It was my cabinet of
curiosities. I don’t have one anymore
unless you count my single cabinet of rocks and fossils.

Unlike Père Jules, I think I’ve become less
interesting with age. Unless, maybe,
these essays are my new cabinet of curiosities…

Thursday, July 31, 2014

“We have a mansion in every glade,” says Jane inTarzan and His Mate(1934). More accurately, the
glades are backyards for Tarzan and Jane, while they spend their nights in
impromptu mansions assembled high above in the trees.

After her visiting American friends coax Jane into putting
on an evening dress, Tarzan sniffs the dress, fingers it curiously, then whisks
her off via jungle vine to one of their treetop mansions.

Cedric Gibbons, head of the MGM art department, was a
master at designing opulent sets. On a daily basis, he oversaw the
designs for royal chambers, grand cathedrals, and rich plantation homes.
MGM specialized in glitzy displays of wealth. Tree houses were a bit of a
stretch for the Gibbons team, headed by A. Arnold Gillespie, especially when
the script stressed their simplicity. No jerry-rigged imitations of modern
conveniences were called for. Tarzan and his mate shared a cozy little
pup tent in the trees, with room for one organic mattress and an animal skin
blanket.

The exterior of Tarzan's tree house in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan) and Tarzan (Johnny Weismuller) in the
interior of the tree house in Tarzan and His Mate (1934).

As one of the last movies to fall into the pre-Code era, Tarzan and His Mate barely scraped past the rapidly
increasing pressure from the censors of the Hayes Office in 1934. Two years later, with the Code operating in
full force, MGM required radical changes in the Tarzan jungle, including a
thorough overhaul of the Tarzan family’s living arrangement. In Tarzan
Escapes (1936), Cedric Gibbons and his art department provided Tarzan and
Jane with a proper tree house mansion with fully-equipped kitchen, a dining
room, and guest rooms.

Tarzan's townhouse in the trees in Tarzan Escapes (1934).

The elephant-powered lift and the
chimp-powered fan inTarzan Escapes (1936).

The charming rustic enclosure that served as their
bedroom/mansion in Tarzan and His Mate
is briefly shown but then dismissed by Jane as “a little bird’s nest.”
She brags that their real home is a townhouse. “We’ve got lots of room.
You’ll be very comfortable. Tarzan made it and I designed it…
Hot and cold water—all the latest conveniences.”

Granted license by the script to build a tree house
mansion, the art department set about creating the world’s ultimate arboreal
playground. It’s a multi-room extravaganza with an elephant-powered lift,
a chimp-powered fan, a wood-burning oven, a complex pulley system for drawing
water from the creek below, and a rope bridge that links the main building to a
treetop gazebo.

While setting a new standard for tree houses, the
new arrangement unfortunately (to the great detriment of MGM’s Tarzan series) domesticated Jane. After taming an ape man and
fending off lions in the first two movies, Tarzan
Escapes relegated her to the kitchen, in charge of cooking the wildebeest
roast. It was an inevitable slide into middle class life for Tarzan and
his mate, but at least they’d always have the glorious memories of their pre-Code
courtship, when clothes were scantier, every glade was a mansion, and the tree
houses were built for two.

About 21 Essays

21 Essays is my cultural history blog. In 2007, I challenged myself to write 21 essays in 21 days on a single focused topic—the classic German silent film The Golem (1920).I liked that format and so I’m reviving it here as a way of exploring favorite things (movies, books, paintings, etc.) in depth.

About the Author

Lee Price is the Director of Development at the Conservation Center for Art and Historic Artifacts (Philadelphia, PA). In addition, he writes a tourism/history blog called "Tour America's Treasures" and recently concluded two limited-duration blogs, "June and Art" and "Preserving a Family Collection."

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"There's something I'm finding out as I'm aging--that I am in love with the world."